


Pater Noster

by lanthano (epilanthanomai)



Category: Boondock Saints (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-10-30 05:14:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epilanthanomai/pseuds/lanthano
Summary: The Latin passage that’s not attributed is from one of Cicero’s letters to his wife upon his exile from Rome: Scr. Brundisi pr. K. Mart a. 696 (58). TVLLIVS S. D. TERENTIAE ET TVLLIAE ET CICERONI SVIS. All of which means it was written in Brundisium, April 29, 58 BCE, to Terentia (his wife), Tullia (his daughter), and Cicero (his son).The other one really is from a first year Latin text, and is a phrase I have never been able to eradicate from my head. If you’re interested, which I’m sure you’re not, Coriolanus was a soldier who became involved in a conflict with the aristocracy over what to do during a grain scarcity (he wanted to keep it as a way to control the population). Go to bartelby.com for Plutarch or Shakespeare if you want to know more.Oh, also, Pater Noster is the literal translation of Our Father, but it is also used as a common noun: pater-noster, which is a rosary. Which, as Catholic-obsessed Boondock fans you may already have known, but I tell you anyway. Shutting up now.





	Pater Noster

The day their father died, Connor walked through the blizzard to find the nearest cemetary with consecrated ground. Murphy stayed behind to wash and dress the body.

The flat, empty plains made Connor feel claustrophobic, or agoraphobic, or whatever-the-fuck-phobic it is when all that air presses down on you and you can’t breathe. Claudo claudere clausi clausum, to shut. Claustra claustrorum, neuter plural, bar, bolt, barricade. Agora agoras, feminine singular, marketplace. Phobos phobous, masculine singular, fear. Fuck. Streets continued from one end of town to the other, no curves, no alleys, just one small grid marking out a space and then stopping. Connor hated it. Their father had picked it because they could walk the seven miles to Toledo and its Greyhound station. They had new habits now, beyond the old daily routine of work, shower, pub. They chose towns for easy escapes. Quick getaways, like cowboys or bankrobbers on a caper. Like murderers and thieves. They had different jokes now, no messing about at work, no “how are you?” “knackered” and the chorus of groans, no perfectly drawn pints, no free boilermakers from Doc at the end of a hard week.

Connor squinted at the roadsign above him, and decided it said Vanderbilt Place. Rather a grand name for another block of tract houses, all snowed in and glowing. There was no movement on the street. The plows hadn’t started yet, no fathers with shovels, or kids on the lawns. It was too late, or too early, and everyone was inside. He coughed and felt the cold air slip all the way into his lungs. His chest ached with it. The wind was finding all the holes in his jeans, leeching warmth from him. His face was stiff with cold, and numb. He was numb. They had been marking time until their father’s IRA lads came through with new papers, and they’d finally asked him for the details, because there’s only so far they’d trust the blood they shared with this man. His heart had stopped mid-plan, and how’s that for a sign?

Connor has discovered that certain things cannot be unlearned. That a hotel room full of dead men smells like an abattoir, and that he can see where a man would be disjointed, like any other cut of meat. That the movies were wrong, that it takes time for a man to die when shot, that he bleeds, and gets cold, and talks and stares and slips into unconsciousness before dying. That sudden death opens the bowels, that bodies spill their secrets at the least encouragement, that his body has no secrets. Every scar is a success. Each closed wound a victory.

The church was exactly where it was supposed to be, modern and ugly, new in the way that always startled Connor when he thought of Boston or, further back, of Ireland. He circled around until he came to the rectory. He knocked, and waited, growing colder and shuffling his feet. Fresh snow gathered in his collar. The priest came to the door, and he must have been sleeping because it took a moment for him to realize he didn’t know the man standing before him. He blinked. “Yes?”

Connor looked at him and thought brief irreverent thoughts about this puppy of a priest. He’d fallen asleep watching cartoons, for fuck’s sake. “I have need of your services, Father.”

“Yes, what can I do for you?” The priest held the door open only partway, ready to close it against him, a stranger here.

Connor had a sudden, intense longing for home. He said, “There’s a man, a dead man.” He took a breath. “A man has died and he needs a proper burial.”

“You’re not a criminal, are you?”

He winced, and decided to mess with the boy a little. “Well, night before last I hustled a guy for fifty bucks, but that’s not what you’re asking, is it?”

“You— what?” He paled, looking younger and younger, and rubbed his hands over his eyes.

Connor could see the thoughts taking shape: an Irish rentboy with a dead body has appeared at my door in the middle of a snowstorm and he wants me to do what? “Darts, Father. Darts. And I didn’t kill this man.” He tried to smile, and failing that, looked the boy directly in the eye. “He needs a Catholic burial.”

The priest looked back at him, folding his arms together and shivering. He sighed and said, “When the storm lets up, then. Tomorrow, probably, by morning. It usually does, here. But you’ll have to dig the grave, the groundskeeper has Mondays off, and I can’t—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Has there been a wake?” The priest’s tone was gentle, and his gaze steady, as though Connor were just another one of his parishioners, another lost lamb.

His voice faltered again. “My brother is keeping the vigil while I’m here.”

“Go then, and come back in the morning. We’ll see it done properly.”

Connor stepped away and then hesitated, putting a hand out helplessly, moved to honesty. “Father, please don’t involve authorities of any kind.”

“So you are a criminal.”

First year Latin scrolls inanely through his head. Coriolanus est malus civis sed bonus miles. Coriolanus is a bad citizen, but a good soldier. Soldier of God. “No. Not in my mind.”

“And is your conscience clear?” Connor nodded. “Rest easy. I won’t turn you in. Come back in the morning, and we’ll get this done.” He closed the door and Connor stood on the stoop, feeling the wind whistling past him, feeling exposed. Non vitium nostrum sed virtus nostra nos adflixit. It is not our flaw but our virtue that destroyed us. He pulled his scarf up over his face and, breathing through the thick wool, turned into the wind and toward Murphy. The night his mother gave him this scarf he and Murphy had been giggling to each other over the naughty bits in Catullus. She’d smacked him when she saw what they were reading, but she’d kissed his hair and wrapped the scarf around his neck before sending them outside to play footie in the street with the other boys. She’d already started on Murphy’s when they left.

They showed it in different ways, missing Ireland. Murphy would say he was going to brush his teeth, or order take out in such an exaggerated way that Connor would flip him off, and then it’d be “oh it’s v for victory, is it?” and where would he be then? Just another mick fresh off the boat. Still, Murphy was the one who used his pocket money for Weetabix and Jaffa Cakes. Murphy was the one staring out into the Atlantic as though Ireland would wash in on the next tide.

 

Murphy sat on the other bed after Connor left. They had been so frantic afterward, stopping the clocks and covering the mirrors and flipping through the phone book for the address of a church, rushed and panicked and now nothing. Just him and the body of his father. Soul absent, just flesh, dust, dead body, weakness of the flesh. Christ. He went into the bathroom and started filling the tub. He rooted around under the sink for cleaner and scrubbed until the smell of the bleach went to his head. He rinsed and refilled and stood there watching steam rise off the water for long moments before he could make himself go back into the bedroom.

He carried the body in a fireman’s lift, and put it down so it slumped against a wall. It made his father look like a drunk, or a bum. An old panhandler. Murphy tugged at the clothes on the body, finding a .22 pistol at the small of the back, a knife in a sheath in the left boot. He stripped off his own shirt, and felt goosebumps rise up all over his chest, someone walking over his grave. Plunging his arms into the water was a shock, but he kept them there until the heat stopped feeling like needles all along his skin. Murphy picked up the soap. It was cheap hotel soap, wrapped in paper, soft and kind of peach-pink. He soaked a flannel and soaped it up and willed his hands to stop shaking. His father’s body, already cooling, was stiffening. This could not be put off. Murphy manipulated the limbs, pushing and pulling and washing clean.

Murphy didn’t realize he loved Southie until he left it. He missed walking the waterfront, breathing sea air and diesel, passing row houses and pubs in restless circuits. He missed taking the red line across the salt and pepper bridge, lost to the sun and the water and the day, meandering into Cambridge and picking up students impressed by his accent and catalogue of languages, reeled out and brandished until sudden shame washed over him and he made his excuses and escaped. Sharing beers with the buskers at Harvard Square, haranguing the street prophets with scriptures, discovering new shortcuts and longer detours. He returned to Connor, to their barely furnished squat, tired and footsore and flushed with cold or heat and their city, stamped out over the day, stamped into him. Written on his body as deeply as anything else he knew.

Murphy wrestled his father back into the bedroom. There should have been keeners, an army of women lamenting, and family, and fiddles and whiskey and storytelling. They should have sat up all night surrounded by the voices of their kin, awash in drink, swept away. He struggled with the weight of his father, trying not to let him drag on the floor, hearing his breath hitch with panic. They had no clean clothes that would fit him. Everything their father owned was worn, or had bloodstains, and it was all black and gray and not fit for this purpose. Murphy looked over at the body on the bed and started to giggle and found he couldn’t stop, the sound of it strangled and loud and hoarse. He gasped and leaned back against the wall and bit down on his lip, stilling himself, shocked at himself, at his unseemly laugh, at the ragged edge of it. A monstrous lapse of impropriety. Impiety. He put his head in his hands and concentrated on breathing, on calm and steadiness and he could handle this. He had told Connor he would, and sent him to find the priest. He would spare Connor this.

They’d been saving money. Some of it went to Ma, and more of it went to beer and cigarettes and nights at the pub. They spent some on warm clothes, and some on the vitamins Connor insisted on since half the time they were eating Spaghettios on toast and home fries at the diner, but mostly they were saving it. They didn’t talk about what to do with it, if it was for a real apartment, or travel—and there was so much of the States to see—or maybe a class or two at one of the universities in Boston. Mostly they watched it accumulate, and smirked at each other over it, as though to say, look, look what we’ve got, look what we’ve done. And then there was the Russians’ money, and the joy in that, and then using it to hide out after Yakavetta. There wasn’t much joy in anything after that.

Murphy broke the lock on the hotel linen closet and searched through the sheets until he found one with no mystery stains or threadbare hems. He wrapped his father’s body in the winding sheet, from the grayed beard to the rough hands to the bare, pale ankles. Murphy started on his third decade, and averted his eyes from his father’s nakedness.

**Author's Note:**

> The Latin passage that’s not attributed is from one of Cicero’s letters to his wife upon his exile from Rome: Scr. Brundisi pr. K. Mart a. 696 (58). TVLLIVS S. D. TERENTIAE ET TVLLIAE ET CICERONI SVIS. All of which means it was written in Brundisium, April 29, 58 BCE, to Terentia (his wife), Tullia (his daughter), and Cicero (his son).
> 
> The other one really is from a first year Latin text, and is a phrase I have never been able to eradicate from my head. If you’re interested, which I’m sure you’re not, Coriolanus was a soldier who became involved in a conflict with the aristocracy over what to do during a grain scarcity (he wanted to keep it as a way to control the population). Go to bartelby.com for Plutarch or Shakespeare if you want to know more.
> 
> Oh, also, Pater Noster is the literal translation of Our Father, but it is also used as a common noun: pater-noster, which is a rosary. Which, as Catholic-obsessed Boondock fans you may already have known, but I tell you anyway. Shutting up now.


End file.
